personally, i hate it. the beta rig we setup at the PC shop i work in has a gig of ram, and a 3.40ghz pentium D with 2X2mb L2 cache, AND ITS STILL SLOW!. its like running windows XP on a pentium three 1.0 ghz, with 128k cache, and 256mbs of SDRAM... personally, i am going with option five. oh, as a note, you can run it with 512mbs of ram, but a gig is recommended by microsoft, personally, i doubt it would run smooth on two gigs of ram, with a 512mb video card.